Thursday, January 16, 2014

Greeks bearing lifts

An entrepreneur finds a need and gets venture capitalists to fund it;
It all began on a summer night in 2010, when 47-year-old Nikos Drandakis, a business consultant specializing in new technologies and media, was stuck in a remote part of the northern Athenian suburb of Kifissia and couldn’t find a cab.
“As I looked at a map of the area on my iPhone, I thought how great it would be if I could see the locations of the nearest taxis,” he told Kathimerini recently.
That was the first hint of his idea for Taxibeat, a mobile and Internet application for calling a taxi that greatly changed the taxi market in Athens when it was launched and has already expanded to Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo and Mexico City. The company recently announced that the London-based venture capital fund Hummingbird Ventures is to invest some 3 million euros in the scheme.
But the last time we saw Paris, the cabbies were revolting.

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